SITE NEWS: Scott Kacsmar Joins FO as Assistant Editor

Four years ago today, Mike Tanier's Walkthrough column talked about new research on the issue of quarterbacks and fourth-quarter comebacks. It turns out that most of the comeback numbers commonly circulated around the NFL were tallied by team public relations departments, and followed all sorts of inconsistent rules. Finally, somebody had standardized the count of fourth-quarter comebacks and separated them from game-winning drives (which include drives in tied games). It was all posted for the first time on pro-football-reference.com, the same day that Tanier wrote about the research for FO.

The man who did that research was Scott Kacsmar. In the four years since, he's become known as "Captain Comeback," and his work has appeared on numerous websites including NFL.com, NBCSports.com, Bleacher Report, SI.com, and Cold Hard Football Facts. And four years from the day we first mentioned him on our website, we're happy welcome Scott Kacsmar to Football Outsiders as our new assistant editor.

Scott is Steel City through and through: born and raised in Pittsburgh, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and a Steelers fan who credits Kordell Stewart for his desire to study better quarterback play. He'll be doing a lot of stat-based articles both for FO and for ESPN Insider, as well as answering the Premium fantasy mailbag and managing the FO injury database. Danny Tuccitto, who held many of those responsibilities, is taking a step back to concentrate on opportunities working with teams, but he'll still be writing some content for FO (including a special tenth-anniversary series updating the best DVOA/DYAR players ever that starts this week).

If you want to follow Scott on Twitter, his new Twitter handle will be @FO_ScottKacsmar.

Scott Kacsmar is not the only new person to welcome aboard. We're happy to add former intern Mike Ridley as a staff writer. You've seen a few things from Mike over the past few weeks. He won't be writing regularly during the season, but you'll see his work next offseason and in Football Outsiders Almanac 2014. We've also brought Steven Steinman, one of the founders of Spreadapedia, aboard as our new Technical Director. As we speak, he's working on the long-awaited, twice-cancelled Drupal upgrade that will hopefully solve a lot of our technical problems and clean up our store interface people use to buy KUBIAK and FOA.

Kordell Stewart made me an NFL and Steelers fan. Before I watched him, I thought execution was the only thing that mattered. Stewart made me realize that strategy is a huge part of the game and I was hooked.

Not a fan of Scott Kacsmar, his articles reek of confirmation bias and his so-called work with "comebacks" just proves they are a meaningless stat that are as arbitrary and random as things like fumble recoveries. Or are we really to believe players like Vince Young and Tim Tebow are really terrific quarterbacks with clutch genes out the wazoo?